Pace Maker

Week Forty – two: Sunday 15 July – Saturday 21 July

'Life is not everything, is not everything ...', so goes the song with the title I can't remember. True, but quality of life is pretty dam important. Would you rather live to be 150, confined to a wheelchair with someone wiping your arse, et al, for the last 60 of them, or live to 80 and have a full, active, self determined time right up to the second you unexpectedly passed away?

My 87 year-old mother has just had a pacemaker fitted. She didn't want it. Devout Catholic that she is, part of her looks forward to the day she can sit with Jesus Christ and/or the Lord God Almighty and shoot the breeze. Why would she want something that was going to prolong her life on planet earth?

But, the doctor pointed out, it will actually reduce your life expectancy by some margin or another. What it will do is improve you standard of life while you are alive. So she had it fitted. Within a week she was up and about, making the most of the new found energy, drive and release she had. For years, being the classic suffering martyr, she had fought through life by the force of sheer will power. Now she realises she was battling against an irregular heartbeat that could leave her body confused, exhausted and playing catch-up.

At the other end of the spectrum, my three and a bit year old daughter lives her life as if the faeres fit a brand new, state of the art pacemaker to her heart every night when she is asleep. Just starting out in this life, or coming towards the final chapters, we all need to set the right pace, make the pace right for us and others around us.

But we all need to remember, it's a long journey, but a short trip; we need to pace ourselves so we don't meet our maker ahead of schedule.